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Sustainability in general and global warming in particular are grand societal challenges. Computer systems demand substantial materials and energy resources throughout their entire lifetime. A key question is how computer engineers and scientists can reduce the environmental impact of computing. To overcome the inherent data uncertainty, this paper proposes FOCAL, a parameterized first-order carbon model to assess processor sustainability using first principles. FOCAL's normalized carbon footprint (NCF) metric guides computer architects to holistically optimize chip area, energy and power consumption to reduce a processor's environmental footprint. We use FOCAL to analyze and categorize a broad set of archetypal processor mechanisms into strongly, weakly or less sustainable design choices, providing insight and intuition into how to reduce a processor's environmental footprint with implications to both hardware and software. A case study illustrates a pathway for designing strongly sustainable multicore processors delivering high performance while at the same time reducing their environmental footprint.
Lieven Eeckhout (2024) studied this question.